1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of connectors suitable for use in data communication, more specifically to connectors that include signal conditioning.
2. Description of Related Art
As is known, a connector with a receptacle configured to receive a plug connector mounted on the end of a cable can be provided. One popular configuration is the receptacle (or port) configured to receive an eight position eight contact (8P8C) module plug. It is noted that the 8P8C plug is often referred to as an RJ45 plug connector (even if the 8P8C plug technically may not be a true RJ45 connector). For purpose of being compatible with popular usage, therefore, this known interface will be referred to as a RJ45 interface herein.
The typical RJ45 receptacle provides what is referred to as a port (or jack) that is sized to receive the RJ45 plug in a desired orientation and include eight (8) terminals for engagement with the eight contacts in the RJ45 plug. The RJ45 plug is mounted on one end of a cable that includes multiple pairs of twisted wires (e.g., twisted pair) and each twisted pair can be used to provide a differential signal channel while being reasonably resisting to spurious signals, thus providing reasonably good performance even with unshielded cables. Therefore, the RJ45 connectors and twisted pair cables have formed a useful part of the network of many communication systems and are popular in wired Ethernet networks used in many homes and businesses throughout the world.
While earlier versions of the communication systems that use the RJ45 connector used two pair twisted pair (e.g., pair 4/5 and pair 3/6) to provide speeds up to 100 Mbps, recent communication systems have begun to provide 1 Gbps or even 10 Gbps data rates and therefore tend to use all four (4) of the twisted pairs provided in category 5 and category 6 cables. Even with the additional pairs, however, the desire for increased data rates has required higher frequencies and increased PAM levels (10 Gbps uses PAM-16 encoding at 650 Mhz, for example). This has led to the need to reduced operating lengths of the cable when using conventional RJ45 connectors in combination with conventional Category 5 cabling. Some have suggested that improved cabling (such as Category 6a or even Category 7 cabling) would help solve this issue. However, for individuals with cables already installed, rerunning cabling is less desirable.
One potential aid is to use an improved port or jack. One design configured to improve the performance of the jack has been to use a signaling module associated with each pair of terminals. The signaling module can include a transformer to magnetically couple the ASIC to the terminals while providing electrical isolation and the signaling module can also include a choke configured to reduce common-mode energy that might be otherwise carried over the differential pair. These jacks, because the transformer and choke use magnetic material, are often known as mag-jacks. Existing designs of mag-jacks, however, may not be sufficient to address system needs. Therefore, certain individuals would appreciate improvements to mag-jacks.